D&D 5E Variant rule oversight?

[Evenglare]

So I absolutely love variant rules and that being said the DMG is pretty much one of the most awesome books ever in this respect. However, I was surprised when I found that there was no stacking of advantages/ disadvantages as a variant rule. By stacking I mean, that each advantage adds to the stack while a disadvantage subtracts from the stack.The question is was this intentionally cut because of the game breaking possibilities or was it merely over looked. If the former is true how badly is it broken.

The reason I'm asking this is because I might try it out next game and was wondering if anyone had some actual experience with this. I'm really on board with this idea so I would like to make it work somehow, perhaps simply increasing the limit by 1 so you can have 3d20high to 3d20 low so stacking a disadvantage would not simply nullify the advantage.

Does this make any sense to anyone? The concept is easy but the explanation is hard to articulate. I'm sure most of you have questioned or thought about this idea before. If I do decide to cap it at 2, then that might be a great homebrew feat to take to raise the cap, or alternatively it could be a level 20 boon.

 

[the Jester]

I've thought about this and discarded the idea as broken. There are too many ways to stack advantage a couple of times, and then suddenly you're always hitting. Conversely, in the dark while poisoned you are just screwed- you're never going to manage a hit with "worst of 3 (or more!)" dice.

Stacking dis/advantage seems to me to basically very close to "Let's take the dice out and just make this an automatic hit or miss".

Of course, the whole notion of "I have 3 advantages and 2 disadvantages, so I still have advantage" makes sense on the surface... but... well, it doesn't matter if you're granting advantage to attackers for six reasons if I can't see you or if I'm sick from a giant spider bite. I'm still unable to see you/weakened and sick.

Now, YMMV- maybe this will work for you- but it looks to me like they left this idea out of the books for a very good reason.

 

[Minigiant]

Back at the beginning of the playtest when (dis)advantage was rare, it maybe could have worked.

But now since it is so easy to grab either as a player, allowing any stacking would make it dominate the entire game and break it.

 

[Warbringer]

It's a lot if fun rolling loads of d20s (or variant game has being do this for years) but in d&d's all or nothing (no partial successes) it can lead to the situation jester outlines above.

Best situation is let them stack, but you can only roll 2 dice and maybe let the "spare" dice be allowed to create advantage for a party member or maybe disadvantage on an enemy roll.

 

[GSHamster]

The purpose of advantage/disadvantage was to streamline all the little modifiers to the die roll that you would get. It was to make the game play simpler and faster.

If you want to stack advantages, I would suggest that instead of rolling more dice, you give +2 for each advantage and -2 for each disadvantage.

 

[Ravenheart87]

Stacking advantages and disadvantages would make D&D a dice pool game with some players.

 

[Blackwarder]

We tried it during the playtest, it lead to the players trying to find every advantage there was and started a race very much like the one we had in previouse editions, was very fun tbh and it slowed down the game.

Warder

 

[Warmaster Horus]

The most I would contemplate would be that any uneven advantage/disadvantage situation would not cancel out but lead to a normal 2-dice advan/disadvan to in the direction of the unbalance. So having 3 advantages and 1 disadvantage would not cancel both or lead to a '3d20' roll, but a normal 2d20 advantaged roll.

However I think the system as is works just fine and keeps metagaming (which will always happen) to a minimum.

 

[Sadrik]

I was thinking of using this variant for advantage/disadvantage: three levels +2/-2, +5/-5, natural '20'/natural '1'. Of course a natural '20' would count as a crit and natural '1' an automatic failure.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I was thinking of using this variant for advantage/disadvantage: three levels +2/-2, +5/-5, natural '20'/natural '1'. Of course a natural '20' would count as a crit and natural '1' an automatic failure.

yea I like this variant better